Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where you can manipulate the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess.

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Recommended By Curators

"You spend the entire game trying to get the girl and then she fucking explodes before you get to the h-scenes. Bullshit. "

Reviews

"...beautiful, entertaining, and inspiring."

— Eurogamer 10/10

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About This Game

Braid is a puzzle-platformer, drawn in a painterly style, where you can manipulate the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. From a house in the city, journey to a series of worlds and solve puzzles to rescue an abducted princess. In each world, you have a different power to affect the way time behaves, and it is time's strangeness that creates the puzzles. The time behaviors include: the ability to rewind, objects that are immune to being rewound, time that is tied to space, parallel realities, time dilation, and perhaps more.
Braid treats your time and attention as precious; there is no filler in this game. Every puzzle shows you something new and interesting about the game world.
Key features:

Newly added Steam Cloud supportSave your in-progress game to the cloud, then play where you left off from on any Steam connected computer.

Forgiving yet challenging gameplay: Braid is a 2-D platform game where you can never die and never lose. Despite this, Braid is challenging — but the challenge is about solving puzzles, rather than forcing you to replay tricky jumps.

Rich puzzle environment: Travel through a series of worlds searching for puzzle pieces, then solving puzzles by manipulating time: rewinding, creating parallel universes, setting up pockets of dilated time. The gameplay feels fresh and new; the puzzles are meant to inspire new ways of thinking.

Nonlinear story: A nonlinear fiction links the various worlds and provides real-world metaphors for your time manipulations; in turn, your time manipulations are projections of the real-world themes into playful "what-if" universes where consequences can be explored.

Nonlinear gameplay: The game doesn't force you to solve puzzles in order to proceed. If you can't figure something out, just play onward and return to that puzzle later.

My review of Braid will be based on 4 categories: Performance, Gameplay, Graphics, and Story. As a summary, Braid masterfully ties the joy of platforming and non-traditional storytelling together to create an art game that really is unlike any other title out there. Billed as a personal critique on contemporary trends in game development by its creator, Braid achieved its goal to become one of the most memorable games released to date.

Performance

Being an indie title, one should already expect that Braid will only deliver the bare-bones needed to run the game. No sliders to slide, no boxes to tick on or off, just good old adjustable resolutions for proper scaling of the game. There is a problem with the speed though as running it at 1080p, irregardless of PC power, will make the game run at slow motion. The only fix as of writing is setting the game to run at 30 FPS which can be done via the launcher. Performance on a FX-6300 processor, R9 270 GPU, and 8 GB of RAM at 1080p gives a constant 30 FPS with no hitches whatsoever.

No crashes experienced during playthroughs but be wary that no game is crash-free. For a list of possible fixes for known problems as well as essential tweaks, please visit this page.

Gameplay

Think of Braid as Super Mario Bros. but with simple time-manipulation mechanics. The whole gameplay of Braid revolves around moving time forward or backward to solve the game's well-crafted puzzles and such; sometimes you move keys around to open blocked doors, situations where you have to pause time at the right moment, and more often than not, you travel back in time to solve a puzzle which has already been done and blocked. The extent of your time manipulation is heavily influenced by the game's six worlds, each one of them altering what your powers can do and each one of them creatively mixing things up that will surely take patience to solve.

Graphics

The graphics are very beautiful. Everything looks like a living painting that just can't wait to pop-out of the screen. Each world is well designed and has its own unique look; from the joyful, sunny fields of world 2 to the silent and eerie backdrop of world 4, the change of scenery as you progress through the game is a complement to the overall story that's already unfolding to the player as he/she plays.

Story

Braid is art and don't let anybody tell you otherwise. Aside from the beautiful painting-like graphics and the excellent soundtrack, Its story about a man and his personal desires is one of the best written in the medium. Braid's unique story doesn't require narrators and dialogue, it's already perfect in the way that it conveys its message through the combination of gameplay mechanics, the art-style of each world, music, and the occasional textbook that tells us of our hero's trials and tribulations. Right from the very beginning of the game, as you see the lone shadow that you start to control and move to the right towards the city engulfed by flames, you'll know that the game is something special.

I have played through this game many times. I've had a number of friends pop round just so I could complete a speed run for them! This game never gets old for me.

Braid is a playform game with a heavy puzzle elemenet which for the most part is based on time manipulation. The puzzles are wll thought out to a point that you may spend a while working them out at first but when you do, it leave you thinking, how did I miss that!

The visuals are beautiful with a stunning soundtrack and deep story. If you are going to be playing this for the first time, I urge you not to rush and read through the books which present the story to you. I fear many people miss it as they are acustomed to the story being forced upon you with cutscenes and dialog.

Braid is really tough. The writting and level design are really worth bearing through it though. Itts a puzzle playformer that involves worlds with different rules. Establishing what those rules are is a nightmare by itself. Trying to figure out the solutions and actually pulling those solutions of then become your next hurdles. This game isn't for everyone, but i think everyone should at least experience this level of creativity. At worst case watch a lets play or read a guide if you are stuck. Doing that will probably kill it though.Note - If you are visually impared you can still play this game. The story is told mostly through writting, but it isn't too tiny, and there aren't that many lines to read. At worst case you can screenshot the bits of story. Another difficulty you might come accross involves identifying things that glow in a particular color. This is related to the physics of each world you encounter, so you may need to pay extra attention, especially with yellow glows cos the enemies in the game are mainly that color.